23. Attracting visitors: A guide to launching and promoting your website

Introduction

So, picture this – you've got this awesome website you've poured your heart and soul into, but there's just one little problem: no one's showing up to the party! I mean, what gives, right? You're not exactly the star of Google's search results either. It's like your website is throwing a party, but it's happening in the middle of the desert, and no one's getting the memo.

In this episode, Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber, will talk about using the power of storytelling to light up the path to your website and make it the ultimate lead-generating machine.

To help you create quality websites that convert, download the free storytelling website wireframe, which includes storytelling structure and techniques we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below):

demodia.com/storytelling-website-wireframe

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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

Subscribe to our biweekly episodes dropping Friday on your favourite podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other.

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Episode Transcript

When you launch your new website, the only thing you want is for people to see it. But attracting visitors is difficult. Sometimes it feels like you're shouting into a void and no one's paying any attention. It's disheartening, isn't it? But it doesn't have to be. If you've been following our process, you already have the right message and the right content, and now you just need to reach the right audience. In this episode, we delve into the world of launching and promoting your website, sharing strategies that will help you drive traffic, engage your audience, and grow your online presence. Launching and promoting your website is an exciting journey. So join us as we uncover the secrets of attracting visitors and activating your website. Hi there and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia. I'm your host Simon Harvey and I'm joined by my co host Daniel Klaber. Hi there Daniel.

Hi Simon.

Hello listeners. Welcome back Daniel and welcome back to everybody. It's been a little while since we all got together actually and sat around here. I know we've had a couple of weeks break in the podcast over the summer, so it's nice to be back again. Yes, definitely. So I don't know about you, you can tell us in a minute Daniel, but I managed to get away to Australia for a few weeks, which was really good. Nice to sort of get away, enjoy some sun and just relax a little bit. I hope that everyone else that's listening as well managed to get away and take a little bit of a break during the middle of the year. So yeah, what about you Daniel, what you get up to, how's things, what you've been doing?

So, I had a great time in Germany. I went there to skydive with a couple of friends, but unfortunately, it didn't all go to plan and I ended up having a bit of a hard landing and breaking several bones in my hand.

That's a great way to spend a holiday, isn't it? Oh, it definitely is. Yeah, I had seen your hand when you were in the office. Yeah.

Yeah, I too have been out for the last couple of weeks.

Oh. How's it going? I bet that hurts, you know, glad to see you sort of a bit on the men now, having had a couple of weeks off there and various hospital visits, how long is it before you're going to be back and posting your videos onto Instagram and Facebook? Well, the

doctor said that it will take about eight to ten weeks until I can fully put force in my hand again Uh huh, but I'm planning to do it in five because I have another skydive vacation in five weeks

You're asking for trouble with there. I know listeners if Daniel's not around again in a couple of weeks, you know exactly the reason why so You know, talking about Facebook, it reminds me, I actually read quite an interesting article recently about that, in fact, I can't remember if it was a film I was watching or an article I was reading, but do you know how Facebook managed to get their first users when they started

off? Um, I know there was a documentary about it, but I never watched it. How did Zuckerberg do

it? They used a strategy that I'd not come across before. It's called collegiate exclusivity, which is a bit to get your mouth around as well. Um, but yeah, basically Zuckerberg initially launched Facebook as a platform exclusively for the Harvard guys. So that part I did know actually, but I didn't realize that there was this whole strategy built around that. You know, he wanted to build this desire for social connections within the student community there. And so by focusing on that specific demographic and feeding them with the right story that meant something to them, he was actually able to create that sense of exclusivity that motivated people to join the platform. So that was the way he sort of kicked off and managed to get everything going the way he did. That's interesting. Yeah. And I think the other thing in there is, you know, he took that and what had worked once with that sort of Harvard example, and then he built that around with other universities. So that strategy of targeting specific college networks and then using word of mouth amongst the students overall, you know, played a massive role in attracting all their initial user base. So I thought that was pretty interesting, actually. And I thought it was good to hear how that was all part of his plan inside

there. Yeah, that's definitely new information for me too. I guess he had to start like that to get this big, right?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you think of how big Facebook is today and I guess they really did need to kickstart some fast growth, otherwise they weren't going to get anywhere quick enough. So yeah, I think you're right. In the beginning, every platform or website needs to overcome that struggle. We all need to gain visitors. Facebook's a good example because Zuckerberg knew exactly who his potential customers were, and he managed to target that segment really efficiently by using different strategies. So, of course, that leads me on nicely to our conversation for today, Daniel. You know, today we're going to talk about how to actually promote your website. We've spent quite a bit of time over the last few episodes talking about how to actually Build your websites and how to actually get it all set up. How to create the story in there, how to lay out the wireframe, how to put all the content in there and optimize your landing pages. And in today's episode, we now want to say, okay, we're ready to launch this. So let's do something with it. So let's take a look at that then. Yes,

I would say the first of these that everyone has heard of, and many of you have probably tried, is social media. Leveraging social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram is a really important tactic these days for increasing traffic. And social was a great place to build an organic following. And what's meant with organic following is, that's a group of users that follow you. who you don't pay for. Unfortunately, in more and more cases, the platforms have realized that they can make good money from businesses. So it's quite likely now that you will have to pay for some of the marketing you do on those platforms. But if you do it right, it's money well

invested. I've certainly seen that over the years. Social media used to be relatively easy to get notice, but um, definitely the platforms aren't promoting business content as much as they used to. Um, you know, for personal posts, it's all right, but for company posts, corporate type posts, you're really having to rely much, much more on sponsorships these days. And, you know, we'll cover more about that in a future episode. Speaking of social more generally though, you know, we've done a whole episode on the use of social um, a few episodes back, um, so don't forget that and go back and listen to there if you want. The key things to bear in mind though is that you need to be continually telling your story. So if you think about when we've gone and created your website generally, what we did is we went and we defined your hero, we defined something they wanted, we talked about their problem and then we talked about our solution, you know, how we solve that particular problem. So those are the talking points that you need to get across. And you need to mention when you're talking to people about your social media and how your website within social media. So launching a website, I know is a great achievement. And as a small business, I know owners like myself are rightly proud of that sort of thing. But if you think about it. When it comes to social posts, how many times have you actually clicked on one of those links where a company posts something like, Hey, we're proud to announce the launch of our new website. You know, it's just not something that really engages people at all. It's an internal thing. It's not something that your customers care about. And that engagement is definitely something we want to focus on within social.

Yeah, you're right. Probably also never in my case. I just keep scrolling when I see something like that.

Yeah, and that's the thing to remember. People aren't interested in what you've done for you. They're interested in how you're going to help them. So when you're creating posts to launch your new website, think about who it is you're talking to, and then create posts that invite them into a story. You can write a short post that talks about the problem that they have, and then link to a page that explains how one of your customers has successfully solved that. You can talk about the thing that they want, you know, what is their desire basically? What are they looking for? And then link to a product page that shows them how they can deliver that. Or you can be the guide yourself and post a question and then link to the answer to that question in one of your blog posts.

And that's the thing. There are so many creative ways that our listeners can drive traffic to their news site without the need of random corporate photos or continual self

promotion. Yeah, the only caveat I'd say to this is to keep in mind that it's not a sprint that you're going to be doing here. Social media is very much of a marathon. It's not something where you're going to drive followers within a few days and then drive clicks through from those followers in a few days. You know, unless you're paying for sponsored posts, it's like you're going to need to post several times consistently over a period of months in order to increase the visibility. So consistency very much is key there.

Well, I guess that's the next question then. What's the best way to promote your website when speed is more important?

The great thing about being a small business owner is that we all want everything instantly. So the answer is to use paid ad platforms like Google Ads. Well, I think we've got to accept these days that ads will be an initial cost that we need to absorb, but they are going to increase the traffic on your website much faster in there. So, there's various formats of ads that we can use to promote the site, but the ones that I would recommend that most people take a look at are going to be Google search, um, keywords and Google's newer performance max campaigns. I've

heard of the keyword campaigns before, but maybe you could explain what the performance campaigns are. I mean, I've not come across those before at

all. Yeah, sure. They're, they're a newer sort of campaign that Google's created more recently. So they rolled them out in the last year or so, I think in there. And the idea of them is that they're much simpler for somebody to set up and manage, you know, somebody without extensive Google ads skills. So as with everything these days, you know, they're using AI. Um, and the idea is that the AI will determine the sort of the main content that it's going to show. It will use the content that it extracts from your web page to try and determine what's the most appropriate audiences and the appropriate way to build the ads in there. And then it will serve out the ad words to the right audience based on selected keywords and things. So it's quite scary when, you know, you're used to having all this ultimate control before, but now, um, you know, you've got to let it go to these AIs. Hmm,

well that's interesting. I'll have to take a closer look into those myself.

It's well worth it, yeah, definitely. You just need to add a few short headlines in there, a few pictures and videos of your target audience and how you solve the problem, and then ultimately you can let Google do the rest in this case. That's crazy. So... Even with ads then don't forget to use storytelling. People don't click on ads for fun. They click on them because they want an answer to solve a problem. Yes,

if you're using the storytelling approach in your ads, your chance of successfully attracting visitors to your website will increase

significantly. Getting people to visit your new website is never going to be a really quick or cheap process. But by following the steps that Daniel and I just discussed, you'll make sure you get the maximum return on any ad spend and put yourself in a position to be able to start generating revenue from your site as fast as possible. While ads are certainly the quickest way to build up traffic, we're going to look into the alternative approaches in our conversation next week. So I definitely recommend that you tune in for that. So if you're having problems setting up and optimizing your website, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the traffic on your website. And give you a proven way to grow your business. So now it's time for me to give you your homework again, as you may know, each episode, I like to give you a set of specific steps that you can take to help improve your website and grow your sales pipeline. Today, we've been talking about promoting your site. And since I know that like me, you'll be looking for fast results. Your task today is to set up a Google AdWords campaign. If you don't already have an AdWords account, then no need to panic. It's pretty easy to set up. All you need to do is go to ads. google. com. So that's ads. google. com. And they're going to guide you through the registration process. It's pretty painless. Hopefully once you've done that, we're going to create a performance max or a PMAX campaign as they like to call them. You need to largely leave the defaults to get you started, but there's going to be a few key things you need to enter. So as you click through, firstly, you're going to need to give the campaign. The URL to a page or a set of pages that you want that advertising campaign to promote. So it could be even your whole website potentially in there, or it could just be a specific subset or just a landing page. What you then going to need to do is to create some images that need to go into your ads. So you're gonna need to come up with some images that are square, uh, a portrait version and a landscape version. And in those you need to put some catchy, relevant images and potentially even include some logos and bits of text. From there, you need to create some catchy headlines and also create some descriptions for your product or service that you wanna promote. Then lastly, You need to specify the audience that you want to target. So this is quite important in here. You can just go in very quickly and select the regions that you want to target geographically. You can go into the advanced settings. If you want to target specific demographics, such as ages or genders. But equally interesting in here, if you're doing business promotions, you can specify certain groups of companies, or you can say, for example, people that have visited a certain website inside there. So that's actually really important and really powerful if you want to be able to target people. That have visited say a partner's website. Once you've done that, the final step is to set up your budget. So it's going to ask you to set up your budget and you can target the budget based on the number of conversions you want. It'll give you a clue in there as to what to expect and how much budget it recommends. Once you've done with all that, hit the publish button and then you can watch as the visitors start to roll into your site. It might take 24 hours or so for the ads to come online, but as soon as they are you can see visitors start arriving. It's as quick as that. When you use storytelling throughout your marketing process, what you're going to do is create an affinity with your audience. And you're going to grow your traffic. So that's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks once again for listening and don't forget to bookmark the podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. We love to share our knowledge so that we can make your business a success. See you next time.